


fanatic

by ilgaksu



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M, Season/Series 04
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-29
Updated: 2018-06-29
Packaged: 2019-05-30 12:21:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,973
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15096608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ilgaksu/pseuds/ilgaksu
Summary: “Wow,” Tausun says, “Kolivan hasn’t told you yet, has he?"The Blade of Marmora have a Lance McClain fan club. Keith is not a member.





	fanatic

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pussycat_scribbles](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pussycat_scribbles/gifts).



> HEY, WHAT'S UP! I'M ALIVE! I'm still writing Voltron! Sorry for the radio silence, an international move does that to you. Ongoing works will be returned to once I've settled into my new house. 
> 
> This fic is for Pussycat, without whom this wouldn't exist.

  


So: things have been getting all kinds of weird, and Keith isn’t counting the fact he’s half-alien this time. Half-alien and a paladin of some mystic space strike team. Half-alien and also a member of an elite resistance group, trying to stop an empire threatening to tear apart the universe -  

Look, the half-alien part has been preying on his mind. For obvious reasons. When he was back with Voltron, he always felt the Galra blood in him burning, marking him out as something other, even when he didn’t have the words for what it was. The longer he stays with the Blade of Marmora, the more keenly he feels the human in him. Always one foot over some kind of divide - tightroping it across the two worlds, which works right up until you look down and see the drop, right there, right under you all along.

There’s just so much he doesn’t know yet. It’s like being spoken to in a language you ought to be fluent in - you can hear the words and they want to make sense, but you’re only catching one in three. This morning - or what counts as morning here - Keith had rolled out of bed, blinking in the artificial light, and had been halfway through chewing down before he’d noticed the huddle in the corner of the mess hall. They had their hoods up, the pale violet glow glistening like nervous sweat. Surely they couldn’t be discussing assignments out in the open? Keith feels his pulse pick up - it’s been a quiet few days, and all the quiet does is leave Keith wandering the base at all hours, sleep a lure just out of reach, determined not to be homesick for -

Anything. Anything at all. As he continued watching, suddenly hopeful - maybe he could tag along, Kolivan is always asking for volunteers - he noticed how the group kept looking around them, murmuring in Galran at a distance too far for his translation receiver to pick up on. He’s pretty certain they’re not anyone higher up in the ranks, but still. Aiming for casual, he wanders towards the platter of what passes as bread out here. His translation receiver flickers, still feeble, but what they don’t know is that Keith has been picking up Galran at a frankly alarming rate.

“Three thousand GAC,” he hears someone say. He’s pretty sure it’s Felixia, can hear the familiar ripple of her voice, but she’s hooded like the rest of them. “That’s what I heard last.”

Someone makes a noise of frustration.

“I hate Glottorian scalpers,” they mutter. “At least with the bootlegs I’m getting ripped off for something I can rewatch.”

A couple of others nod, sympathetically.

“I’ve never even gotten to go _once_ ,” another Blade complains. Keith can hear something brighten in their voice.  Is that Khaziss? They’ve had guard duty together once, and they hadn’t stopped peppering Keith with questions about the other paladins once. “Wait - they’ve gotta be moving on out of the Silas system soon, right? Right?”

“About that,” Felixia replies, hushed. Keith moves closer, stands, as though gripped by indecision over the genetically identical protein cubes. Fuck Lance for saying he couldn’t act to save his life. If he could see Keith right now, he’d - “They’re moving to Ansedoria soon, and leave is only two quintants. It takes at least eighteen vargas from here to Ansedoria.”

“Maybe we could -”

“We could what? Do you want to be the one to explain to Kolivan why you’re off on Ansedoria?”

Khaziss visibly wilts.

“Thought so.”

Keith feels them sense him. Shit. He’s been still too long. He blindly grabs a protein cube in each hand and aims for a saunter past, throwing one up and catching it again. He’s mid-throw when he sees through the protective huddle of their armoured bodies and catches sight of the hologram on the tablet Felixia is holding.

He doesn’t drop the protein cube, but it’s a close call. He comes up from scrambling to catch, whip-fast reflexes snapping his hand out, to be faced with Felixia, Khaziss, and whoever the rest of them are. Their masks keep them anonymous, but he can almost smell the discomfort radiating off them. It’s like children caught shoving extra candy into their pockets at the pick and mix stand. Keith pushes away the old memory of stolen Charleston Chews, the guilty sweet stick of them to his teeth, and says a highly-edited version of what he’s thinking, which is, “So. That’s Lance. Why are you all looking at a picture of -”

He’s got no doubt about it. He’d recognise that - he’d recognise Lance anywhere. It’s a side-effect. Of the proximity. Recent, lapsed proximity. The mind-melding thing! Of course. That’s only natural. You can’t live squashed up next to Lance’s mind for that long before some of it starts to phase through, starts to echo familiar. The ghost-taste of candy, something sweet he hadn’t been allowed, rises in his mouth again. Keith swallows. A side-effect.

It’s a very good picture.

Of course, he thinks, almost distantly, watching the set of Felixia’s shoulders morph into something a little like panic, he knows about the shows. Coran has seen to it that you can’t take a single step onto any kind of space station in the galaxy without running up against a glitzy advertisement - holograms, posters, Lance’s stupid blue eyes following him around corners like a question -

Kind of stung that he wasn’t part of it. He’s part of a secret resistance group, not dead. But then he remembered how much of it involved acting, involved being some kind of exaggerated version of himself, how it involved being in front of a crowd - and he’d gotten flashbacks to Public Speaking class and thanked the stars that he’d been pulled away from the team before Coran got whatever madcap plan this was stuck in his head.

Lance probably loves it, he thinks ruefully. All that attention. Realises he’s staring at the picture still. It’s not - it’s just - he hadn’t known Lance could arch his back quite that far, and Keith has thrown everything he had at Lance in simulations, watched him get away and get back up and watched his grin get harder, flintier, diamond-edged. Something whittled down, something that at its basest element is dazzling. Is this some kind of new trick? Innate flexibility? Felixia and the others look at each other briefly, and then converge on him, eclipsing him in black and purple. It’s only as he activates his mask that he realises. He’s been press-ganged into a fan-club without ever having his arm twisted.

“We can explain,” one of them says. That’s Soyja. That’s definitely Soyja, what the fuck, why is he here -

“Yeah,” Keith hears himself replying. “Yeah, that would be cool. If you could do that. Any time now.”

“It’s just -” Felixia shrugs. “I mean, look at him.”

“I am,” Keith points out, somehow unable to tear his eyes away from the hologram. It takes some effort - he has to blink and then look away with his eyes shut - but he manages it. “I am looking.”

“I’ve never seen anything like him,” Khaziss says, in a voice that sounds unnervingly dreamy. There’s even a wistful sigh for punctuation. “Are there more humans like him? Back on your home planet?”

“I hope not,” Keith says on automatic, registers the disappointment - the disappointment? - and then, out of nowhere, corrects himself. “He has a family back on Earth, but we don’t exactly - we’re not identical, when we replicate. Reproduce.” _Not_ a word he’d ever planned on using in proximity to Lance’s name, but there you go. “There’s just him.”

There’s a weight to those last words. Nobody else seems to pick up on it.

“See! Exactly!” Soyja sounds triumphant.

“He has a family?” Felixia presses. “He told you about them?”

“Kind....of?” Keith hedges, stepping back a bit.

He doesn’t know why he’s bothering. They’re so obviously eager for information - the violet light from their masks winking excitedly at him - and it’s not like Lance has ever held back on anything to do with his feelings, his thoughts, any of it. It’s like he feels the constant need to verbalise his internal monologue. Keith, who sometimes went a week or so without speaking to another person out in the desert, had found it exhausting at first. Even so, he’s seen a lot more than Lance might have wanted him to see. Might have wanted anyone to see. Sometimes, when they’ve formed Voltron, their breaths synced, their minds seamless, he can taste salt on sea air. He can hear laughter. And when he watches his own hands twist the hair of a little dark-haired girl back into a French braid, they’re Lance’s hands, a child’s attempt at a friendship bracelet a stark, sun-bleached pink against the brown of his wrist.  

And then he feels this wrenching feeling, like something’s been taken out of his chest. He’s not sure that’s the sort of thing you share.

“I should -” Keith begins, hesitant, but then the alarm starts to blare through the mess hall, summoning them all to the brig. Something’s escaped.  

Keith’s never been so grateful to go up against something armed and dangerous. He takes the opportunity to disappear.  

 

*

 

It takes a while for some of it to sink in. Keith is weary, stood up in the shower, thoughts a quiet exhausted flatline when it occurs to him. They’d been talking about bootlegs.

There are bootlegs of Lance McClain on the Blade of Marmora’s top-secret, knowledge-or-death, _secret_ base. Keith had nearly gotten himself killed multiple times just to prove he was worthy of setting a single foot anywhere near here. And Lance McClain had just gotten smuggled in, along with the rest of the contraband all of them pretend not to know about until they want to know about it: the blue liquor that tastes like sweet potato and can knock you out in five sips. The months-old Mer pin-up magazines. Anything that isn’t another protein cube.  

It’s so unfair Keith feels an entirely reasonable wash of irritation course through him. The suspicious voice in the back of his head that whispers _Lance and Keith, neck and neck -_ the one that wonders if this is the feeling behind that pissy look Lance gets sometimes - is one he resolutely ignores.

It takes Keith’s brain, addled by tiredness, another five minutes to remember the going prices for contraband on the base. He nearly chokes on his toothbrush. Didn’t he hear someone say three thousand GAC? It must be a recent bootleg, he reasons. Like, a recent show. That one looked pretty recent. Keith’s damn sure if he’d seen that before, he’d have remembered, what with how it’s been seared into his retinas now.

Keith only has about a thousand GAC to his name right now, petty cash he’s borrowed for missions. It’s not like he’s had anything he’s needed. Or rather, anything he’s needed that he couldn’t ask Kolivan about, or barter over for himself. You’d be surprised how much the Blade are prepared to lose in stupid bets, or gambling, how much they’ll trade for a chance to hear about Voltron. It’s not like there’s anything else to do in downtime. Keith hasn’t really gone in for the last one. He has the sense Allura, Kolivan and most importantly Shiro wouldn’t think too highly of him selling the secrets of the galaxy’s last hope for an extra serving of that thing that tastes like ripe peaches.

He’d assumed he’d gotten the impetus behind the Voltron questions before, just dismissed it as normal curiosity. Nothing could top the resurrection of the most powerful weapon in the universe, right? Now he’s wondering, remembering how Khaziss had gone quiet for whole, delighted dobashes listening to Keith’s replies, especially when they involved any news about Lance. He’d not thought anything of it, been so grateful that Khaziss had stopped speaking he’d gone with it -

Keith catches himself grinding his teeth. Looks up to see a faint glow from his eyes in the half-light. He blinks, sees yellow, keeps blinking until he opens his eyes and just sees himself again.

It’s not worth thinking about, he tells himself firmly, and goes to bed.

 

*

 

Keith dreams, and wakes up angry about it. He marches down to the training bay, because it’s the best way to get out of his head - or get something out of his head - but when he gets there it’s already crowded, even though it has to be at least four vargas before morning briefing. More importantly, it’s at least a varga before the canteen in the mess hall opens, so why is everyone up and tearing into sentries? Keith usually isn’t alone anymore - turns out this kind of behaviour is a Galra habit, and it’s always so fun to learn things you thought were personality traits are some kind of genetic recall - but the bay is never this full this early.

“What’s everyone so worked up about?” Keith asks when he notices Tausun, an Olkari-Galran engineer, sat back to watch the proceedings, tossing protein cubes into their mouth like popcorn. Tausun snorts and says, “New mission posting. The top two in stats by end of the quintant get to go.”

“Since when?”

“Since someone noticed the announcement going into the feeds about ten vargas back,” Tausun shrugs and tosses up another cube, swallows. Must’ve come through after Keith went to sleep then.

Keith turns back, drums his fingers against the glass separating them from the bay proper, and then slides his hood up.

“Not you too,” Tausun says, sounding totally unsurprised.

“Whatever it is,” Keith says, “I want in.”

“Of course you do.”

Keith doesn’t reply. He doesn’t say: there’s something yawning open in my chest, some kind of black hole, and everything I throw at it comes rattling back to me. He doesn’t say: I need to find something that sticks. He doesn’t say: there’s a war on. I don’t know who I’ll be when I get back. I don’t have time for this.   

“Seems a waste of effort on your part, is all I’m saying,” Tausun continues. Keith pauses, with his hand outstretched to code in the door sequence. The monitor gleams at him, waiting to read him, waiting to see the Galra under the skin.

“Don’t see how trying to do some good is a waste,” Keith replies. No, snaps. There’s some kind of heat still left, building up at the back of his skull, and it’s easy to mutate it into anger. Tausun looks at him, long and slow.

“Wow,” Tausun says, “Kolivan hasn’t told you yet, has he?”

Tausun lets it dangle between them for a second, leaning forward. Keith wants to bite desperately, but the angle of Tausun’s eyebrow, the fine purple hair plucked away and painted back on, is so Lance he finds himself retreating into stubbornness. That’s not a Galran habit, or a human one. It’s one that’s his, just his - the stubbornness - so Keith shrugs and moves back to the monitor. He senses Tausun crack.

“Wait!”

Keith makes sure not to smile, turns back, blank-faced and victorious.

“You’re already listed on the briefing,” Tausun tells him. “That’s why it’s a waste. They won’t like you heading in there, not if you mess up the rankings for them, especially since you’re getting to go anyway.”

“I am?”

“Obviously,” Tausun drawls. “It’s Voltron coalition thing or something, isn’t it? Can’t be short a paladin. Looks bad.” Tausun grins now. “They say they’re all going to be there.”

 _They’re all going to be there:_ Keith’s heart feels ready to burst, longing imploding. Is he really going to get to see Shiro? Have the others missed him? He wants to have been missed. He wants so badly he almost misses how Tausun’s grin widens, his next sentence:

“All of them, even the Blue Paladin.”

Keith looks at Tausun blankly. He’s so excited it takes him a second to remember. In case he needed a prompt, Soyja flings Felixia right up against the glass. She pushes back, kicking him square in the chest with enough force to bowl him over, leaving sweaty handprints smeared along the glass.

Oh, Keith thinks. Then: you have got to be fucking kidding me.

“That’s why they’re all so -” Tausun makes a fist and smacks it into his palm, then pats the space next to him. “Stay and watch, if you want. I’m waiting for the heads to roll.”

“I’ll pass,” Keith says shortly, and leaves. He can just about hear Tausun snickering over the sudden sharp spike in irritation, and he’s sure he catches Khaziss giving him a look, huge-eyed and wary, from their side of the glass. Someone uses the distraction to take their legs out from under them. Keith watches them go down dispassionately - tells himself it’s dispassionate, even though satisfaction licks through him - and goes to be literally anywhere else.

 

*

 

There’s a lot of bruises at morning briefing. Keith estimates from missing faces that there's a few out for the count, holed up in the healing bay for the next few hours. From the look on Kolivan’s face, he’s none too pleased about it. Keith rolls his shoulders, for once the only clean-nosed one of the bunch, and tells himself that’s why he’s savouring the frankly uncomfortable silence. Kolivan paces back and forth, slow as a military parade, whilst the Blade members who showed their faces, bloody noses and all, avoid the laser of his gaze.

“I should begin,” Kolivan says levelly, betraying nothing, “By reminding you all we work best with each other, as members of one body. Conquering others for our own petty goals is Zarkon’s realm, not ours.” He pauses. “Having said that, I find myself impressed at the level of - shall we say, vivacity - with which many among you rose to this challenge.”

Wait, what?

“I understand that downtime between missions can lead to, shall we say, infighting of a kind, especially amongst _our_ kind.” He gets a laugh. It’s a weak laugh, but he gets a laugh out of them. “However, I feel duty bound to remind you all that we are devoted to the fall of the Galran Empire, and ally ourselves with the _whole_ of the Voltron coalition in pursuit of that goal. Keeping that in mind as we go forward, I do find myself looking forward to seeing the results at quintant’s end. Access to the training bay has been locked until further notice. I expect normal duties to be resumed effective immediately. Dimissed.”

Sorry, _what?_ Keith finds himself moving on instinct, muscle memory and years of Garrison hardwiring kicking in, until he’s sat right where he ought to be this time of day, in a meeting overlooking shipping routes, without any real recollection of how he got there. His regular routine - the routine that has become regular for him - is something he passes through in a daze. It’s like he’s being wheeled along, like he’s the needle of his Dad’s shitty old record player, running along the grooves cut for the singular purpose of replaying the same old love song, over and over -

He thinks about the dream he had last night, long enough and intently enough that he looks up to see half the table gazing at him expectantly. He opens his mouth, then closes it.

“I forgot what I was going to say,” he lies, burning, and then sinks back down into recall the second they stop pinning him with their eyes, letting them move on without him. He stays, stuck, held back as though by some kind of tide.

He picks through his food in the mess hall, mechanical about it - the habit of someone used to eating bad food, one of his human ones, just shovelling it in without thinking too hard - when a Blade member he vaguely recognises from drills slings a leg over the seat next to him, placing his tray down without invitation, a strange conspiratorial look on his face.  

“Mind if I sit here?”

Keith shrugs and the guy settles in.

“I don’t think we’ve met,” Keith volunteers, after eating in amiable silence. The guy smiles, showing all his teeth, and says, “No, we did. We have. Sort of. Yesterday? With, you know,” he drops his voice, “Soyja’s lot.”  

The needle on the record that is Keith skips, and that same annoyance blares up through him like static. What is wrong with him? He takes a breath, and then another, thinks of Shiro and of letting Shiro down, and how bad it would be to let Shiro down, even here, far away, where he can’t see and can’t know it’s happening. Patience yields focus.

Keith manages a tight smile.

“Oh, right. Yeah.”

The guy laughs again, self-conscious, nods towards Keith. He dwarfs Keith easily. He does an aborted movement, something hovers on his lips and then he swallows it: Keith would bet his life it was _vrepit sa._ Habits. They die hard.

“I’m Neze,” he says instead. Keith nods back, returns to his food. It’s more tasteless than usual. “You must think us kind of -”

“Kind of what?” Keith interrupts, not even sure why he’s interrupting. His voice crackles in his throat like spitting fire.

Neze rolls the next word around in his mouth before he says it, hesitating. There’s not a direct translation from the Galran but Keith knows what it means, even without the translator superimposing three or four meanings over the word in his head. It means: _outsider. Out of place. Freakish. Not of us, not of our kind._

Keith knows what it means. He looks at Neze for a moment, and then goes back to his last spoonful of chopped carbohydrate, licks the salt off his lips. Thinks of salt on the air, and the unrolling spool of the sea, plucked right out of Lance’s head. He thinks of how there is salt in sweat, and Keith thinks of his dream last night and drops his spoon into his empty bowl with a louder clatter than he’d planned.

“I mean, because of how you know him!” Neze blurts out, misinterpreting the silence. “I don’t mean because of, you know, him being human. There’s nothing wrong with being human.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Keith replies dryly, and reaches to take a swig of the water here, the electrolytes and other added nutrients making it fizz in his mouth somehow.

“No, really!” Neze protests. “Humans are so - I mean, I don’t know that many, we don’t meet many, but the ones I’ve seen are -” He coughs, a side-effect of talking, chewing and gesturing enthusiastically with his free hand. “Something else.”

He sighs. Are they talking about Lance? Keith feels like they’re talking about Lance now. Again.

“I’m so mad that Tobak knocked me out of the fifth spot earlier. You know, it wasn’t that close, but maybe if the first three, like, if there was another mission came up or something -”

Keith doesn’t even know who Tobak is. He’s officially given up on trying to keep track of the names of all the alien comrades he has who apparently are crushing it something chronic on Lance McClain, especially after the bruise count this morning. The whole thing ought to be laughable. As soon as he sees the others, he’ll tell them and they can all laugh about it.

“Anyway,” Neze says, with far more grace than Keith could have managed, “It is what it is. There’ll be a next time. You can report back to us.”

He snickers and rolls his eyes, inviting Keith to laugh too. With him. Patience, Keith reminds himself, waiting for the abrupt raze of impatience itching at him to ebb. Patience. Patience yields. Patience yields focus.

Keith unclenches his jaw.

“Sure thing,” he says.


End file.
